When you are hiring a plumber, you may not think that this is such an important decision, but it is. A plumber takes care of the veins and arteries of your house; without them properly maintained, your home would not stay “healthy” for long. This is why homeowners should look to find reliable professionals to make sure everything is in order with their living space.
You may think that plumbers are only there to take care of the pipes in your home, but they do so much more. Plumbers also take care of essential parts of the home such as toilets, water heaters, faucets and other systems that allow water circulation. A plumber is not only there to do important repairs on these systems, but he can also prevent big problems and give you advice on avoiding costly repairs.
What is even worse is that we’ve all heard many terrible stories about reckless plumbers who charge into people’s homes, spend a couple of minutes meddling with some tools and then spend the rest of the hour playing with their phone and, when they are done, they give their customers a huge bill. I am not saying that all plumbers are con artists, but the reality is that the number of skilled professionals in the plumbing market is dropping.
This is why you must learn what to look for in a plumber and how to determine whether or not he is the right man for the job. This is why I will share some important advice on this subject with you in the following paragraphs.
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Talk to the people you know and see who they suggest![]()
The first place to start when looking for quality plumbing services is to talk to your neighbors, friends and family members and ask them who they recommend. Referrals are rather important for almost all plumbing services. Simply put, a certain number of good people recommend a service to their friends and family, and this is how most plumbers become successful professionals.
If there are a lot of people praising a certain plumbing company or a single person, than it means that they invested a lot of hard work to gain the trust of their clients. In case you are new to a certain neighborhood, then it is generally a good idea to knock on your neighbor’s doors, so that you can meet them, introduce yourself and ask them for important information about the neighborhood.
When you visit a certain plumber’s website and check their reviews from customers who were most satisfied, you might think that this plumbing service is professional, but this doesn’t mean anything. It is important that you find independent websites and see the reviews of those plumbing services there. Furthermore, the reviews you should be paying attention to the most should be those negative ones, not the positive reviews.
Those good ratings usually don’t mean anything and they are quite easy to get. The meaningful reviews are those negative ones and you should read them carefully to see why the dissatisfied client disliked these plumbing services. Read these negative ones and determine whether they are truly complaints or just people who simply like to complain out of spite. It is important to remember that all businesses have bad days.
Plumbers have these bad days as well, so not all people can be satisfied. This is why you shouldn’t simply rule out some plumbing company just because they had one or two bad reviews. It is also important to see how they react to their bad reviews and if they tried to make things right or they simply don’t care about what their previous clients think.
If you want, you can even call the Better Business Bureau to check whether a certain plumbing business had complaints in the past three years and what their ratings are. I doesn’t matter what the size of that business is; it should not have a lot of complaints at the Better Business Bureau if that business is top notch.
Before you hire a certain plumber, you should check to see if that plumbing service is registered with your local WCB (worker’s compensation board) and that the registration of that business is still standing. Why is this insurance important for you? Simply because if a plumber gets hurt while working on your property, you can protect yourself financially and avoid getting sued. It might sound like a stretch, but it happens.
When you hire a handyman or a general contractor to do some plumbing work at your home, this can void the house insurance you have, especially if your home gets damaged from their work. For example, no water damage done on your home will be covered by the insurance, if the water damages happened because you hired unlicensed workers to do some plumbing work for you.
If you want to find out what is and what’s not covered by your insurance policy, or in case you want to notify your insurance company of some major work that you are going to have on your home, you should also read the policy really carefully. If something is bothering you and you have questions, call up your insurance provider to get the answers. The best way is to ask everything you want to know before you even start working on something in your home.
Is that plumber experienced and licensed?
I cannot stress just how important it is that you work strictly with licensed plumbers. You should find out whether the plumbing business you are considering has working employees who are licensed plumbers or not. You can do this either by looking through their website or by calling that business and asking them over the phone. If you are still not certain that their workers are licensed, you should ask the plumber that arrives at your door to show you his license.
A plumber is always supposed to carry his license to work, so if he tells you “he forgot it” then maybe you should reconsider your decision. The last thing you need is someone poorly trained and inexperienced working around your house, making mistakes, and creating even bigger problems on your plumbing systems.
Even though any plumber with a license can perform some basic plumbing repairs or plumbing jobs in your house, there are also a lot of plumbers who specialize in certain areas. This is why, if you have some specific problems that require a lot of experience in that field, you should find a plumbing company or a plumber that is specialized in doing this kind of work. These professional plumbing businesses have a lot of employees and they use scheduling software for plumbers so that they can designate the right person for the job.
What can you do if you pay someone to install new fixtures or do plumbing repairs, and after that, you find out that there is a problem with those things that he or she worked on? Are you going to call that plumber again and pay him to come back and take care of those problems that should not even be there in the first place? Most professional plumbers will not charge you for coming back again, because they feel like it’s their responsibility to fix this problem; they stand behind what they do and they guarantee their skills.
It is important that you find out what type of guarantees and warranties a certain plumbing business offers. A respected plumbing business will guarantee for their work after a certain period of time has passed and, if they did some new installations, these should come with a warranty.
It is important that you understand everything about the warranty you get. It will cover any replacements of fixtures or appliances that have been made. But still, the question remains; does this mean that you will have to pay the plumber to replace it or not? You should ask these questions before you let a plumber do his work in your home. If you don’t like the answers you get, you should look for your plumber somewhere else.
Last but not least, consider the price of their services. You should never assume that the highest price means that a certain plumber is the best. You should also avoid those plumbers that have the lowest prices. A lot of plumbers compensate their poor services with low prices, but their bad work will only cost you more in the future. On the other hand, those expensive ones might want to rip you off and sell themselves more expensively than they’re actually worth. Consider all of the things above before looking at the price and you can get a better picture of how good that plumber actually is.